“Mijo, you know we’re just joking right?” His mother spoke while he washed his hands. A few seconds later, he felt her familiar warm hands wrap around his torso from behind and her head rest against his left shoulder. “There aren’t many mothers out there who can proudly say they have a son who actually spends most of his time indoors, enjoying the company of his parents.” Asa heard her sigh softly and step away from him, dropping her hands to her sides. “I’m just cherishing it.”
“I’m not mad, Ma.” He sighed, placing one hand on her shoulder as he leaned in and kissed the top of her head. “Maybe the slightest bit annoyed, though.” He grinned, and his mum rolled her eyes and knocked his hand off.
“Go on,” she said, giving him a slight nudge. “I don’t want you getting late for school.”
Asa grabbed his bag from the floor, where he’d set it down beside one of the tables’ legs, and swung it over his shoulders. “Adios, Papá,” he said, patting his father’s arm. “Bye, Ma.”
“Te quiero,” both his parents called out in unison, the words falling on his ears just as he stepped out into the chilly autumn air and proceeded to shut the door behind him.
A strong gust of wind blew past, rustling the leaves of a tree by the sidewalk on the edges of their front lawn. One of its branches stretched far enough that it hung low over their house, and he watched as a leaf struggled and eventually broke away from the branch, fluttering around in the air before landing a few feet away on the ground.
A smile graced his lips without him even being fully conscious of it. He walked forward, remembering what Carmen had said once about the wind whispering something intimate to the leaves that turned them into different shades of red and orange.
He picked it up, the fragile stem held gingerly between his thumb and forefinger as he twirled it around and around, staring at it as if it was going to sprout wings and fly itself back up.
Carmen, he sighed mentally. He just couldn’t look at the world the same way anymore—and maybe, just maybe, he didn’t even want to.
The world through Carmen’s eyes seemed like a more beautiful perspective.
•••
“Ace?”
Asa’s hand froze, his fingers tightening around the copy of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince that he was stuffing inside his locker. All that giddiness he’d felt ever since he’d woken up this morning vaporised into thin air, leaving a trail of coldness and misery in its wake.
“Asa,” he corrected, finding his voice after a few minutes of internal struggle.
“Potato, potato.” Isla grinned. Asa wasn’t looking at her, still keeping his eyes fixed on the interior of his locker, but he recognised the grin in her tone. He would always know without needing to look. Just like how he knew that it was false bravado keeping her chin up and shoulders ramrod straight right now. Just like how he knew it was uncertainty and worry that made her curl her palms into clenched fists that she tried to conceal by folding her hands across her chest.
Asa didn’t have to look at Isla to know. They were best friends. At least, they had been.
“Wow,” she said, and he heard her chuckle. “Harry Potter again? You’ve read the series, what, eight times already now?”
He knew that keeping his face turned away would come off as immature, but for the love of God, he couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eyes. All her words came crashing down in torrential waves over him, dragging him under a little more as each second ticked by. His breathing quickened and then faltered as he felt his chest constrict, the knife she’d stuck in him twisting further into his flesh as a brutal reminder that it was still planted in him and would probably never come out.
She thought he was pathetic. His best friend—his best, best friend in the entire goddamn world believed that about him. Was that how she’d always seen him?
Had she stood by him out of pity’s sake, then? Had it always been a one-sided friendship with her?
Asa felt sick. His lungs shrank and the walls closed in on him as he found it increasingly harder to turn towards her. God, he felt pathetic.
“So, there’s this party…”
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. He wanted to scream at her, but his ears won’t take in her words anymore. His throat was dry, and words weren’t coming to him. It was a different kind of speechlessness, though. Not the kind that Carmen cast over him—
Carmen.
Her name slammed into his head, ricocheting off the walls in his mind and resonating throughout his entire being. It played on his heartstrings like it was a long-forgotten tune that his soul had missed so, so much. And just like that, his chest stopped constricting. His lungs expanded, and he could breathe again.
Asa could breathe again.
Carmen reminded him to breathe and, in that moment, Asa wondered if it was people like her that you held close and never let go of. The ones that reminded you to breathe rather than those who took your breath away.
Carmen was like the moon, he then realised (though he felt sort of idiotic for even coming up with that analogy). She wasn’t anywhere near him but she still found a way to be a beacon of light for him in the dark.
And all those seeds her smiles had planted in the spaces of his ribcage, all those seeds that her laughter had
